Investments again

I made a couple of tweaks to a couple of investments the last few days.

There's a GIC my parents bought for one of my kids that I ended up now managing. The last deal was good, a 5 year stepper finishing at over 7% in the final year. Pretty good for a GIC.

So the TD bank called after sending the notice in the mail that the GIC was maturing. so back to the branch to figure out what to do with the rollover. The TD person was pleasant and knowledgeable. She suggested a more comprehensive personal financial review at the start of the sit down. I explained that with RRSP I get 100% matching from work with Manulife. And this investment is something my parents bought for my son. So I just needed to deal with this GIC rollover and that was that. We quickly moved on to the GIC.

Well my son is nearly in high school so a 5 year scheme isn't in the time frame for an education oriented investment. Additionally the rates on the 5 yr stepper now suck. After going over some options I decided on a 3 year scheme at 1.95% a year. Not great but should be good enough for its purpose.


Over to my own RRSP. I did a small amount of research on dividends a few weeks back. After noticing that Aliant pays 7% a year dividends and their shares have been in a $26-$31 band basically since at least the middle 1990s I wanted to try to get some of this dividend action. If I could I would just put like 40% or whatever of my Manulife RRSP into Aliant and take the 7%. Alas of course it's not so easy. Anyway I deleted a 15% money market and 5% 1 yr fixed allocation from my instructions. I shifted the 20% into 5% of four funds, 3 large cap Canadian and 1 balanced fund which is something like 40% equities.

And with that Manulife grades my selections as "moderate", up from "conservative". Which I think is about right. What they call the "balanced" approach I think is too much stock market / non and low dividend shares. I'm still getting 100% on my own money that I put in due to matching so hopefully this new allocation will give a slightly better yield. I mean retirement is something that's out there, right now say 21 years away. Who knows what might happen in those years but hopefully on a track to a reasonable future standard of living if I can get there.